The Dramatic Procedures of Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka’s legacy as a dramatist is a testament to what a proper cultural education, clear ambition, and strict commitment to craft can produce. 

Wole Soyinka’s plays, though written and performed for the first time over six decades ago—the last of them, Alápatà Àpáta, was published in 2011—remain profoundly relevant in our contemporary global context. As societies worldwide probe issues of identity, power, and cultural declination in an inexorably interconnected world, Soyinka’s plays, like the mythical white hen of Ọbàtálá spreading soil to create the earth, scatter these themes across the global stage, cultivating a nuanced sphere viewed through an African lens. His masterful blend of traditional Yorùbá elements and Nigerian experience with universal human concerns speaks to our current struggles with globalization and cultural authenticity. Moreover, in an era and climate marked by political ferment and social unrest, Soyinka’s incisive critiques of authoritarianism and his calls for social and political responsibility offer as much resonance now as they did relevance to the times when they first appeared. Revisiting these plays today not only widens our initial understanding of African literature but also provides fresh insights into the complexities of our modern selves and world. 

‘The primary function of literature is to capture and expand reality,’ Soyinka wrote a decade ago in his preface to an anthology of ‘new writing from Africa South of the Sahara’ titled Africa39. ‘It is futile,’ he continues, ‘therefore to attempt to circumscribe African creative territory, least of all by conformism to any literary ideology that then aspires to be the tail that wags the dog. Literature derives from, reflects and reflects upon—Life. It projects its enhanced vision of life’s potential, its possibilities, narrates its triumphs and failures.’ However, it is not only life’s potentials, possibilities, triumphs, and failures, but also the curious exuberance with which life integrates these conditions that are Soyinka’s ultimate literary conspiracy towards impeccable representation. 

Notwithstanding the substantial extraliterary considerations that abound in his body of works, the fundamental territory of Soyinka’s prowess is none other than his mastery of craft, even more so in drama than in poetry, fiction, and the essay—all of which commands considerable recognition and reverence through his marked idiosyncrasy of cognition, perception, and execution. As a result of his impeccable concatenation of these qualities, his characters are not only recognizable in our immediate societies but strikingly reflective of our realities, so much so that his culturally conscious language, the vessel of his characters’ shot at lifelikeness and prominence, commands so strange an effect as though encountering a grinning Sisyphus...

This essay features in our print issue, ‘The Enduring Voice of Wole Soyinka’ and is only available online to paying subscribers. To continue reading register for a free trial and get unlimited access to The Republic for a week!

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